Question

I have a Folder which has multiple sub folders. Each sub folder has many .dot and .txt files in them.

Is there a simple solution in C# .NET that will iterate through each file and check the contents of that file for a key phrase or keyword?

Document Name        Keyword1         Keyword2         Keyword3        ...
  test.dot              Y               N                Y

To summarise:

1. Select a folder
2. Enter a list of keywords to search for
3. The program will then search through each file and at the end output something like above, I am not to worried about creating the datatable to show the datagrid as I can do this. I just need to perform the find in files function similar to Notepad++’s find in files option

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

What you want is recursively iterate files in a directory (and maybe it’s subdirectories).

So your steps would be to loop eeach file in the specified directory with Getfiles() from .NET. then if you encounter a directory loop it again.

This can be easily done with this code sample:

  public static IEnumerable<string>  GetFiles(string path)
  {
        foreach (string s in Directory.GetFiles(path, "*.extension_here"))
        {
              yield return s;
        }


        foreach (string s in Directory.GetDirectories(path))
        {
              foreach (string s1 in GetFiles(s))
              {
                    yield return s1;
              }
        }
  }

A more indepth look on iterating throug files in directories in .NET is located here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brada/archive/2004/03/04/84069.aspx

Then you use the IndexOf method from String to check if your keywords are in the file (I discourage the use of ReadAllText, if your file is 5 MB big, your string will be too. Line-by-line will be less memory-hungry)